RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

The Circle closes on #OWS.

The cycle is completed: the past and the future have merged, to become the eternal Now. The prophecy has been fulfilled and the revelations made clear. A man with no mask and tattered regal finery has come to the midnight feasting hall; the star-bruised sky itself bears witness to the rightness of this moment. Things have become again as they were, and the memory of a time when things were not as they now are fades like the memory of a half-seen teardrop on the face of a passerby. All is as it has always been.

At one of Arts and Culture’s meetings—held adjacent to 60 Wall Street, at a quieter public-private indoor park that’s also the atrium of Deutsche Bank—it dawned on Joe [Therrian]: “I have to build as many giant puppets as I can to help this thing out—people love puppets!”

(Via PJ Tatler) As God is my witness, the only thing that I added in that quote was Joe Therrian’s last name.

Perhaps I need to explain this one.

Those of us who have been doing the VRWC blogging gig for a while – in my case, since about 2002, 2003 – have long since become simultaneously wearily, and entertainingly, familiar with a certain sub-demographic of the antiwar movement: which is to say, the people who make the giant paper-mache puppets. These people were and are fascinating, in their way: their devotion to their peculiar art was impervious to any sort of logic, reason, and/or mockery… and was indeed a transcendent beacon of bloody-minded pointlessness in a milieu that was not exactly unknown for fostering such things. Completely useless too, of course; at least, to their side. Giant Puppet People were and are very useful to anybody who needed a handy illustration of just how fringe the antiwar movement was. And now they have begun to manifest within the Occupiers.

Hey, that soft sound you’re hearing? It’s the relevance of the Occupy movement, coughing out its life in an abandoned, drafty room.